pork
Sixty percent of pork in New Zealand is imported. Over eighty percent of bacon and ham. So who's growing the rest? The answer is fifty-eight farms — fewer than the country has Pak'nSave stores. Here's who they are, who makes the best bacon and ham from their pork, and where to buy it.
eggs
A friend told me she buys Otaika Valley free range eggs because she liked the pohutukawa flower on the label. She didn't know who owned the brand. Neither did I, in any real detail. So I went looking.
organic
If you buy organic in New Zealand, you've probably felt like you're on your own. Thin shelves, high prices, a fussy choice. But across Europe, governments have spent thirty years building the largest organic food economy on earth. Here's what they know — and why we haven't started the conversation.
A monthly recap of everything published — the egg investigation, the Long Drift series, the chicken trilogy, the Real Food Map launch, and a plantation that turns thirty. Plus a quick orientation if it's your first visit.
A curated map of 128 places across New Zealand where you can buy food you can actually trust — organic shops, farmers' markets, growers, refilleries, and suppliers worth knowing about. Not crowdsourced. Hand-checked.
Macro looks like a single organic brand. It's actually an umbrella covering certified-organic, free-range, "wholefoods," and "no artificial" products — only some of which are organic. Here's how to read the difference at the shelf.
New Zealand produces over a billion eggs a year. Fewer than 20 farms produce every certified-organic egg among them. This is a map of what actually exists — and how to find the eggs that match what you're looking for.
Wattie's and McCain are closing. Marsden Point is rubble. The trams are gone. New Zealand keeps dismantling what works — and calling the rebuild progress. This needs to stop.
The word "organic" has no legal protection in New Zealand. Here's what the certification marks actually mean, who issues them, and what sits outside the system entirely.
A new piece most days. Daily investigations into where NZ's food really comes from — sent direct to your inbox.
I went to the shop on a Wednesday at three, and the very first thing that was wacky to me was a chicken, all pink, wrapped in plastic and bright, that had bathed in some chlorine to keep it just right. A homage to a certain Wednesday book — and five wacky things hiding in plain sight.
I keep hearing about the Gene Technology Bill. Most people don't fully understand it. The documents are heavy. The language is technical. That's part of how this works — when something is hard to read, people zone out. So I tried to read it anyway. Here's what I found.
Bostock organic chicken costs around $200 more per person per year than the standard supermarket brands. That's about $3.85 a week — a takeaway coffee. Here's a side-by-side comparison of what your money is actually buying you, brand by brand and process by process.
A chicken raised for meat passes through a sequence of inputs and processes between hatching and packaging. Coccidiostats in feed. A chlorine bath at slaughter. Chlorinated water absorbed into the meat and sold by weight. Here's what I found when I mapped the whole journey.
New Zealanders eat 40 kilos of chicken a year. Every supermarket bird has spent its life on Argentine GM soy sprayed with glyphosate, which the WHO calls a probable carcinogen. Bayer has paid US$11bn settling cancer cases while insisting the chemical is safe. Here's what's actually in your chicken.
This Saturday, the only commercial tea plantation in NZ turns thirty. Zealong is BioGro-certified, sold at Harrods, and family-owned. So why can't you find it at Commonsense Organics? A discovery piece on NZ's only home-grown organic tea, and what's about to change for the word organic.
A curated map of 128 places across New Zealand where you can buy food you can actually trust — organic shops, farmers' markets, growers, refilleries, and suppliers worth knowing about. Not crowdsourced. Hand-checked.
The counterargument to everything this series has argued is real — NZ is a high-cost producer and imports reflect that. But it assumes stable shipping, stable trade, and stable geopolitics. None of those assumptions are performing well right now.
Food culture isn't transmitted through information. It's transmitted through practice — through being in a kitchen while someone cooks. When that stopped happening, the food system moved into the gap. And the generation growing up inside it doesn't know what it missed.
Macro looks like a single organic brand. It's actually an umbrella covering certified-organic, free-range, "wholefoods," and "no artificial" products — only some of which are organic. Here's how to read the difference at the shelf.
Pams claims 68% local sourcing. It's a portfolio average. The categories where it falls short are the exact categories where NZ food manufacturing was built — and is now closing.
Three New Zealand food institutions. Three founding acts of resistance. A century later, each one now serves the opposite of its founding purpose. This is how a long drift looks — like nothing, for a very long time.
